The Might Have Been (30 page)

“Daddy.”

He put the phone book back in the drawer, returned his laptop to its case and left the room, walking through the rain to the lobby to log onto the Internet there.

Later that afternoon when he tried again to sleep, it came to him grudgingly and when he woke—what, forty-five minutes later?—there was a commotion outside. Loud voices. Banging. When he opened his door, he could see a semicircle of his players knotted on the parking lot in the rain, enraged by something, shouting. Two or three of them pushed forward and then he could see a fight going on, players trying to pull bodies apart.

“Hey,” he shouted, jogging barefoot across the wet lot, the gravel prickling his feet, but the fight continued as if no one had heard him. He shoved into the scrum. Someone thrust him backwards and he pushed into it again, aware that Dominici and Vincent were there with him, shoving men backwards. An elbow caught Edward Everett in his cheek, stunning him. Dominici was yelling, “Stop it! Stop it!” Finally, they got to the bottom, two players grappling with each other on the ground. Webber and Nelson, Webber sitting on Nelson’s belly, Nelson grasping Webber’s wrists, straining under him.

“You cocksucker,” Webber was shrieking, flailing, trying to get his arms free of Nelson’s grasp. Together, Dominici and Vila finally succeeded in pulling Webber away, Vila by locking his elbows in
Webber’s, Dominici shoving against his chest until he tumbled backwards. There was a crack and then Webber stopped struggling,

“What the hell happened?” Edward Everett said.

The players looked everywhere but at him. Nelson was up on his knees, breathing hard, spitting something out of his mouth: saliva mixed with blood.

“What happened?” Edward Everett said to Webber, who was still on the ground, moaning now, holding his right shoulder with his left hand, rolling side to side.

“It was—” Sandford began, but Martinez interrupted him with a syllable: “San!”

“What happened, Sandy?” Edward Everett asked.

Sandford gave Martinez a look. Martinez shook his head, tight-lipped.

“Oh, shit,” Sandford said. “Webber’s an asshole.” He turned to Edward Everett. “Webber just jumped Nelson, saying something crazy.”

“Nelson don’t belong anymore,” Martinez said through clenched teeth. Nelson was on his feet now, rubbing his jaw. His left eye was swollen shut and his top lip was fat, curled into an exaggerated sneer. Martinez made a lunge for him, but Sandford restrained him. Nelson danced back. “You better fucking get out of here,” Martinez said, trying to wrest himself free of Sandford’s grasp. Nelson glanced briefly at Edward Everett.

“What did Webber say?” Edward Everett asked him. Nelson shook his head and limped across the parking lot toward the service station next door, rubbing his left ear.

“Skip,” Vincent said. He was crouched beside Webber, his hand on Webber’s shoulder. “I think he’s hurt. I mean bad.” When Edward Everett knelt beside Webber on the wet gravel, he could see he was pale and shivering. He gently tried to roll him from his side onto his back but Webber gave out a yell and stayed curled on his side.

“Well, fuck,” he said, standing. “Somebody call 911.”

They had to wait for four hours in the emergency room. It was Saturday night: “crazy night,” the girl at the reception desk called it
when they registered. The place swarmed with patients and their friends and families: people who came in bloodied, children racked with coughs; EMTs rushing people on gurneys through the automatic doors. A gas station clerk stabbed in a robbery. An older man dying from cancer. As Edward Everett and Webber sat waiting for someone to call his name, Webber rocked in his chair, cradling his right arm, saying over and over, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

When a nurse came to take Webber back to an examining room, Edward Everett followed them, lying, saying he was Webber’s father. Where she left them was not a room, exactly—merely a bed, a chair and a small table, separated from the other rooms by a drape. On the other side of it, the dying man moaned incoherently. Edward Everett could hear soft voices: a nurse explaining that she had given him something to ease the pain, the staff was doing its best to get him into a room upstairs. Edward Everett sat beside Webber and when he began weeping, Edward Everett laid his hand on his hurt shoulder. Webber reached up abruptly and grabbed his hand; at first he thought it was a response to pain but Webber was squeezing tightly, as if he was afraid Edward Everett would leave him there, alone.

By the time the doctor came to examine Webber, the dying man had been moved elsewhere and his place was taken by a small child who had pushed a piece of candy up his nose. “Don’t be mad, Mommy,” the child said. The doctor who came to see Webber was a willowy Indian woman who may have been less than thirty but was, despite her age, crisply efficient. “It would be better if you left us,” she said, already peeling back the sleeve of Webber’s hospital gown and touching his shoulder tenderly.

When Webber winced even at her delicate touch, Edward Everett started to protest but Webber snapped, “Fuck, go, go, go.”

He wandered down the hall to another waiting room farther from the admissions desk. It was quieter, only one other person there, a woman knitting. A television mounted to the ceiling played a ball game with the volume muted, the Cubs and the Cardinals, the top of the fifteenth, a one–one tie, and he sat down to watch. The Cubs’ half inning ended and the camera showed a long shot of the view
from behind home plate in the new St. Louis ballpark, the one where he had played knocked down years ago by a wrecking ball. Beyond the center field wall, the city skyline rose and, at the center, the Saarinen Arch glinted. The camera panned the crowd: tens of thousands of people in red and blue, animated, raising index fingers, waving. It was all so prosperous, Major League Baseball was. He realized where he sat was roughly halfway between the two cities, but it might as well have been on another continent.

When the doctor came out to tell him that Webber was asking for him, she told him that Webber’s shoulder was broken. “A proximal humerus fracture,” she called it. Her accent made it sound like something beautiful.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“With surgery …” She shrugged.

“He’s a ballplayer,” he said. “A good one.” One to whom someone once gave a two-million-dollar signing bonus, he thought, and who should, if he stopped letting his immaturity get in the way of his talent, make more than fifty times as much in his career.

“He can live a normal life,” she said. “But baseball …” She shook her head.

“He can’t …” He didn’t finish the sentence.
Be through
, he was going to say. He didn’t like Webber. He took his talent for granted, was a jerk to his teammates, shrugged whenever Edward Everett gave him advice, as if to say,
You have no idea what it’s like to be able to play the game as I can
. Edward Everett felt suddenly angry—at Webber, at Nelson, at the doctor. She was from a country where they didn’t play baseball. There, it was cricket: what could she know about baseball? She flinched and he realized that she could see the anger crossing his face.

“He’s so young,” he said. “He could heal, couldn’t he?” A page came over the intercom for Dr. Abadeen.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pointing in the direction of the speaker in the ceiling, and she turned, hurrying down the corridor.

On the television, one of the Cardinals players was digging around third, sweeping wide, dashing down the line toward home plate, colliding
with the catcher, who took a throw from the cutoff man, the ball jarring free, bounding away, the Cardinals pouring out of the dugout to greet the runner who brought home the win.

Edward Everett turned away and went back toward Webber, trying to figure out how to tell him that he wouldn’t ever be one of those players on the television. Not for their club. Nor for Pittsburgh nor St. Louis nor Boston. Nor anyone. He was twenty and his life as he expected it to be was over.

W
hen Edward Everett got home on Sunday night after a miserable doubleheader—two losses, eight–one and, in a second game to make up for the rainout on the day before, four–zip—he had two voice mail messages. He expected one to be from Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, demanding more information about Webber’s injury. Almost immediately after the taxi had brought him back to the motel from the hospital, he’d taken his laptop to the lobby to email a report about Webber’s injury and prognosis to Johansen. It took him more than half an hour to compose since he wanted to be accurate, but also he kept changing it, first reporting Nelson’s part in it, then deleting him from the account because he had no idea how Marc Johansen, MS, MBA, would react to his allowing Nelson to stay with the team after the organization had released him. Finally, he’d said only, “injured off-field in physical altercation with person not a team member.” It was after all the truth. Since then, he’d obsessively checked his cellphone, expecting he’d find a missed call from Mark Johansen, MS, MBA, but the big club was ominously silent.

As for Nelson, he had vanished. When the bus left the lot at the Urbana ballpark after the final game, Edward Everett scanned the faces on board: no Nelson. As the bus sat at the exit from the parking lot, waiting for traffic to clear before making its turn, he expected to
see Nelson running toward them, but he didn’t show up, leaving him God knew where. Perhaps, Edward Everett thought, Webber—pitiful Webber, still in the hospital, his mind doped with Percodan—had knocked into Nelson the sense he needed, as if one of the punches had shaken loose the last bit of—what, insanity? eccentricity?—whatever had made Nelson keep showing up to a team where he did not belong anymore.

The first message on his voice mail at home was from Collier. “Gimme a call,” he said. It was almost eleven when he heard the message; Collier was probably still up—he suffered from insomnia; in the past, he had called Edward Everett even later than this for no particular reason except that, Edward Everett could tell, his house was too quiet and there was nothing on television. Collier would not want to hear about Webber, one of only a few players who drew fans to a game—what fans there were.

The second message was a hang up, just the sound of what seemed like a woman’s voice exclaiming a syllable he couldn’t discern and then a receiver clattering twice before the dial tone came on. When he checked his caller ID, it read, “Blocked.” He replayed the message several times, raising the volume, wondering if it was Renee’s voice, wondering if he could understand something of what she had been trying to say. “Ha” was all he could make out, or “Ah.” It may have been a frustrated exhalation, or the start of a sardonic laugh, but it also could have been the beginning of a word: “Hon,” maybe, he thought. Nonetheless, he clicked “save” and, after seeing that the kitchen light was on at the Duboises’ house, went next door to get the dog.

On the team’s way out of Urbana, Edward Everett had asked the bus driver to stop at a Czech bakery they passed. Once, Renee had joined him on a road trip there and, exploring the town while Edward Everett was at the ballpark, had discovered the bakery. She took him there for coffee and kolache, Renee trying out the little Czech she knew, greeting the tiny, white-haired woman behind the glassed counter of bread and sweets, “
Dobry den
.” The woman had brightened and begun speaking rapidly before Renee blushed and said, apologetically, that “hello” was the extent of what she remembered
from the lessons her maternal grandmother had given her when she was a small girl. Nonetheless, the baker had not accepted any payment for the pastries they ordered and had also made them take a box of them for the road. “Grandma used to make these at Easter,” Renee said on their drive back to Perabo City, opening the white box, filling the car with the scent of flour, sugar and raspberry.

On this trip, he’d bought a box of the kolache, and now he took them over to the Duboises’ house. He crossed through the two yards, up the back steps to the deck off the kitchen, since he didn’t want to ring the front doorbell. Rhonda often had the six a.m. shift at Lowe’s, meaning she had to leave at five to get there on time. When he peered through the window beside the door, he could see that Ron sat at the table, a sheaf of papers spread across it. Edward Everett tapped on the glass and Ron gave a start, staring out at him, coming cautiously to the back door, squinting as if that would help him see into the darkness.

“It’s me,” Edward Everett said.

Ron opened the back door cautiously. “You about gave me another heart attack.”

“I brought these,” Edward Everett said, holding out the box of pastries to Ron. “They’re from this bakery in Urbana that Renee once found and I thought—”

Ron’s face softened. “Ah, jeez,” he said, taking the box, but reluctantly, in a manner that Edward Everett imagined resembled someone accepting the cremains of a loved one. “Renee …” he said, his eyes not meeting Edward Everett’s.

“What?” Edward Everett asked.

“You know I like you, Ed,” Ron said, hefting the box as if he were weighing it. “But this is just not a good idea.”

“Is someone there, honey?” Rhonda called from another room. When she came into the kitchen and saw Edward Everett, however, she stopped at the doorway, her posture stiffening. “Oh,” she said.

“It’s a thank-you for watching Grizzly,” Edward Everett said, nodding toward the box. “I know he’s an imposition.”

“Did you tell him?” Rhonda asked her husband.

“Tell me what?” Edward Everett said to her.

“Ron, you said you were going to.” When Ron didn’t respond immediately, she said, “I’ll get the dog.”

Ron held out the box of kolache and Edward Everett took it from him. “I don’t think it’d be good for us to watch Grizzly anymore,” he said. “It’s not personal. It’s just that—”

Then Rhonda was back, carrying the dog. She set him on the floor, her eyes not meeting Edward Everett’s. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice all but inaudible, and left the room.

“Renee just asked us not to do anything that might …” Ron said, shrugging.